Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has warned the leftist Labour Party government against backtracking on Brexit as Brussels has begun to pressure London to caving on fishing rights, migration, and national sovereignty as Prime Minister Starmer seeks a new trade deal with the bloc.
“Reform MPs will challenge any attempt by Labour to surrender our waters back to the EU. We are watching Keir Starmer very closely,” Nigel Farage warned.
The warning from the Brexit leader came as reports emerged that Brussels will push for the UK to grant fishing rights of British waters to European fisherman, open up immigration through the bloc’s youth mobility scheme, and to abide by rulings of the European Court of Justice, the Times of London reports.
A document of the EU’s planned negotiating points seen by the British paper of record and which will reportedly be presented to European ministers next week, laid out a list of key red line demands for the bloc in exchange for a renegotiated post-Brexit trade deal with the UK, a key campaign pledge from the struggling Starmer government.
According to the document, Brussels would seek to eliminate Britain’s independent marine protection policy and thereby grant rights for European fisherman to exploit UK territorial waters.
The co-founder of the Blue Marine Foundation conservation charity, Charles Clover called the demands from Brussels as “absolutely outrageous,” and warned that such an agreement would see “French trawlers able to trash UK marine protected areas”.
“This is an unprincipled, unselfconsciously greedy mugging of the UK on behalf of the EU’s fishing nations, completely ignoring the EU’s own commitments to protecting nature,” he said.
Meanwhile, the EU is also set to demand that Britain codify into law all new Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) European laws on food and agriculture in order to secure a trade deal on food exports. The document stated that the EU would not accept similar legislation, but rather intends to demand that the UK explicitly codify EU rules into British law.
It would also require that the UK abide by rulings from the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in matters of European law, in move that would directly undercut British national sovereignty.
Finally, the EU reportedly plans on demanding that Britain re-enter the bloc’s youth mobility scheme, which would allow citizens under 30 in the EU to live and work in Britain for up to four years.
It comes as Brussels has launched a lawsuit against London over supposed breaches of the post-Brexit deal, including deportation orders against EU citizens and refusal of entry for EU nationals at the end of 2020 after the UK officially left the bloc.
While Prime Minister Starmer may be pressured into accepting EU terms on the hope of spurring the struggling economy of Britain, a Brexit backtrack could open up his government to further criticism from Farage’s Reform UK, which has already overtaken Labour in popular support in a recent poll.
Amid the rise of Reform, on the backs of disaffected voters from both the so-called Conservatives and Labour, there have been suggestions that the government may suspend local council elections, which Farage has pointed to as a key moment for his upstart party to demonstrate their ability to wage national political campaigns.
Despite potentially being on the precipice of ceding sovereignty to the EU and cancelling next year’s local elections, Baroness Harriet Harman, a former leader of the Labour Party, has attempted to mimic the political playbook of the Democrats in the United States in branding Reform as a “threat to democracy”.